You, Me, Us
by Winter Sapphire
Summary: They each had their differences, but all that seemed to do was balance the other out. Peter/Claire. Canon, but pretty much AU after season 1.


Title: You, Me, Us  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance/General  
Pairings: Peter/Claire  
Warnings: Very slight references to season 3, but nothing specific about it.  
Summary: They each had their differences, but all that seemed to do was balance each other out.  
Author's Note: This is _definitely_ AU, not in the fact that they're suddenly not related but in the fact that season 2 did not happen, thus season 3, Peter did not go missing for four months after the explosion, and well... just read?  
And isn't it funny, I wrestle for inspiration for this for a week and it finally comes in the form of strung-together drabbles. XD Go figure.

Written for pairechallenge on LJ, prompt "Patience"

* * *

Peter always considered himself the dreamer in their relationship; he was always picturing the future and all the good it had in store. Sure, maybe he was just picking up on Isaac's or his mother's power, but it was always something good when it concerned the two of them, and that was all he really needed to just know everything was going to be okay.

Claire considered herself a realist. Nothing about them was normal, from their own individual person to them as a whole. Maybe she didn't know what the future held, but she at least knew that they could never be normal, no matter how much she wished they could. And, as much as she loved the dreamer in him, she wished he could see that as well.

---

Peter, they were surprised to find out, was definitely the more talkative one in the relationship. He could go on for hours about his current hospice patient, or the new discovery Mohinder had made regarding the things they could do ("He said something about adrenaline, Claire, and how it can trigger these things. Isn't that amazing?"). Everything about life fascinated him--and everybody knew it. Sometimes he wondered why no one seemed to notice how much more captivated he was by her, but he wasn't going to complain.

Claire didn't like to talk about her life very much. She would with him, sometimes, if he asked her what was going on with her friends or if she had any big projects coming up for college that she needed help with. But talking about her life now tended to lead into talking about her life back then, and that was something she tried desperately to avoid. Because, as it was, one thing always led to another and the chain usually ended up in tears. She would always be thankful he knew when to transition from her separate life back to his.

---

And even though she didn't like to talk much about her life, Claire was definitely the more social of the two. She had no problem attending Nathan's shindigs (they both liked to call them that) and she pulled off her act as a "foster" daughter so convincingly that she could have made Broadway stars that had trained their whole lives for that role jealous. She claimed it was all thanks to her cheerleading days.

Peter knew better. It was true he liked to seclude himself into a corner during the events with a glass of wine in his hands that would slowly disappear throughout the night, but he still watched her and listened in on her conversations. She lied so smoothly sometimes that he almost started to believe her himself, sometimes to the point of wondering why their feelings were as guilt-ridden as they were. It never really surprised him, though. She was, after all, a Petrelli. The ability to lie convincingly was somewhere in their genes.

---

One thing that neither of them were surprised to find out was that Peter was the patient one in their relationship. Ever since they had stopped the explosion he had been content to just sit back and let things happen. Well, maybe he wasn't that patient--if an Armageddon was on the horizon he sure wasn't going to just let it happen--but he wasn't the same terror-stricken man he had been during those weeks. And if he had to wait a hundred years for the two of them to have the chance to be together then he would.

Fortunately for the both of them Claire had little patience at all. She completed her homework nearly as soon as she walked through the door, if not sooner, and always got a head-start on long-term projects. She could wait a total of thirty seconds after she woke up before she yelled through the bathroom door to "Hurry up, already, my hair is a freaking mop!" She knew they would both still be the same as they were now in five, ten, fifty, a hundred years, but it didn't matter. She had him right here and right now, and she wasn't going to wait a hundred years for something that was currently right in front of her eyes.

And, to be perfectly honest, Peter found that Claire's impatience was one of her most appealing aspects to him--even if she did tend to hog their bathroom.


End file.
